When two chemically divergent molecules are put into close spatial proximity, they may self-organize by non-covalent interactions as a means of minimizing the overall energy of the system. This phenomenon, known as molecular self-assembly, when harnessed in a controlled fashion, has allowed for the exquisite engineering of nanostructures, such as lipid vesicles and liquid crystalline phases. While the technological implications of self-assembled systems have been the subject of intense research for decades, the industrial output of such technology has been scant. In contrast to bottom-up self-assembly, top-down lithography is a well-established industrial technology that allows for the patterning of geometrical designs with nanometer-level precision and accuracy. Lithography has been the workhorse of the microelectronics industry for decades with patterning techniques being highly developed. Though conventional lithography has achieved the continual shrinkage of surface features, it is widely believed that fundamental limitations will soon be reached. This provides the motivation for the exploration of self-assembled structures. In particular, recent efforts have striven to bring a greater degree of control to self-assembled structures by combining molecular self-assembly with lithographic techniques in a process known as templated self-assembly. By and large this field has been dominated by the use of block copolymers (polymers composed of chemically distinct blocks).
However, a need remains for a simple method for directing the self-assembly of mixed polymer brushes.